This project integrates the traditional focus on institutional and organizationally based nursing practice with a significantly broader focus that also includes the meaning and practice of nursing within families and communities. It focuses on 19th and early 20th century nursing in the United States. This project conceptualizes nursing as both a particular kind work and a particular process of identity development. The project will argue that individuals chose nursing not just for meaningful work but also for the power and the gendered salience it brought to lives lived within local families and communities. It will present the choices made by nursing men and women as those that strengthened their positions within their individual communities. It will also provide a broader historical perspective on the social, political, class, and gendered processes through which individual people, local events, and customary ideas forged a sense of professional identity that simultaneously maintained ethnic, religious, and racial distinctiveness. Nurses have historically represented a much broader cross section of American women and some men than most comparable disciplinary groups, and their experiences are thus more generalizable. This project is also deliberately national in scope, comparing and contrasting the experiences of nursing women and men in the northeast, the southern states, the Utah frontier, and California. This project captures relevant data through analysis of documents about nurses found in archival family papers throughout the above-identified regions of the country. The place of this data within more extensive collections allows one to consider these individual nursing experiences within a broader family, community, and social perspective. Finally, the intersection between place and gender will illustrate how nineteenth and early twentieth century nurses, involved in local events and influenced by customary and socially resonate ideas still forged a broadly based, purposeful, and dedicated sense of mission predicated on gendered ways of "being with" and "doing to" others.